How Cool! Egg Shell Calcium – Smells Like Dessert, and It’s Healthy!

These are before and after pictures of my eggshells: whole, and then powered. Holy Cow do they smell delicious, like meringue. This is my new, favorite way to get my calcium, the most abundant mineral in our body.

Years ago I took calcium supplements; I actually used them as my “candy”, and so did my kids. Ugh. Big mistake. Most calcium supplements use a form of calcium that doesn’t actually make it into our bones. Worse, many calcium supplements contain junk we don’t want in our body. Look at this ingredient list of Viactiv:

Really?? Yet many in the health profession recommend this to “keep our bones strong”.

Here’s the scoop on calcium in a nutshell. Our bones and teeth should hold about 90% of our bodies calcium. When we eat absorbable calcium (like the kind in eggshells, raw dairy, bones, almonds and greens, all Real Whole Foods), our body puts the calcium where it belongs: the bones and the teeth.

When we eat processed foods and calcium supplements, which contain cheap and poorly absorbed forms of calcium, our body puts the calcium where it doesn’t belong: arteries (that’s what “hardening” refers to), kidneys (stones), skin (scleroderma), eyes (cataracts), joints, even the prostate and ovaries, which also can become “hardened”.

Most ironic of all, study after study shows that calcium supplementation doesn’t increase bone density, and that countries who supplement the most have the highest rates of bone fractures.

Back to my Egg Shell Calcium beginning, we need good calcium! Not just for strong bones and teeth, but for our nerves, our enzymes, and every cell of our body. Good calcium makes us normal – one of my biggest goals!

Save all your egg shells in a big cup, and keep the cup in the fridge until you have 10 or more.

Boil the shells in a pot of water for 10 minutes.

Dry the shells in the oven on 200 for 10 to 15 minutes.

Grind in a coffee grinder; a blender or food processor’s blades will be too big.

One teaspoon of eggshell calcium contains about 800mg of calcium, so use accordingly. Recommendations for adults are around 1000 mg a day, more for pregnant and lactating women, less for kids.

I’ve been putting mine in my morning smoothies or hot drinks, anything with fat because fat is absolutely essential for calcium absorption into the bone, as is Vitamin K2 (not K1, a la Viactiv) and Vitamin D2.